American politics

Mike Daisey

Attacking the press

WITH regard to the controversy over Mike Daisey's mostly made-up story about working conditions at Apple's Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, I wanted to pick up a point from my colleague, who points out that Mr Daisey "clearly seemed to be making journalistic truth claims." I agree. Mr Daisey initially told producers at "This American Life" that his account was accurate, and gave them a fake name when they asked about contacting his translator. Both of those things suggest a deliberate effort to deceive (although he has now shifted to saying that he was using "theatrical licence" to tell a story with "integrity"). And the fact that he was making journalistic truth claims is critical to understanding why what he did was totally wrong.

Some have suggested that Mr Daisey could have had a similar emotional impact, without all the controversy, if he had simply clarified that his work was largely fiction and merely inspired by real events. The problem is that Mr Daisey's monologue is only partly a critique of working conditions in Chinese factories. It's also an indictment of Western complacency in the face of the same—complacency on the part of the consumers and on the part of actual journalists. That being the case, Mr Daisey's description of his "reporting" techniques matters. We know that most of the things he describes happening at the Foxconn factory actually have happened, if not at the factory in question. We know that because journalists have reported them as they occurred. But Mr Daisey is suggesting that all of this is happening at once, at the same high-profile site, and that anyone could have strolled up and seen for themselves. This is what he says on the show, after describing a (fake) conversation with a 13-year-old worker:

You'd think someone would notice this, you know? I'm telling you that I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak Cantonese. I have only a passing familiarity with Chinese culture, and to call what I have a passing familiarity is an insult to Chinese culture. I don't know [BLEEP] all about Chinese culture.

But I do know that in my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were 14 years old, 13 years old, 12. Do you really think Apple doesn't know? In a company obsessed with the details—with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case—do you really think it's credible that they don't know? Or are they just doing what we're all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?

A central conceit of the piece, in other words, is that these abuses are so widespread and so flagrant that anyone, even a simple country monologuist wearing a Hawaiian shirt, could saunter up to a factory and document them all in a couple of days. The implication is that no one but he, Mike Daisey, cares enough to make the relatively modest effort it would take to know more. And because this is happening specifically at an Apple facility—a high-profile company with a big fan base and a reputation for being detail-oriented—the truth must be sinister. People are so attached to their iPads that they're deliberately turning a blind eye to obvious human-rights abuses. And journalists haven't reported this because they're too lazy, or too stupid, or they just don't care.

This is incorrect. The New York Times' Charles Duhigg and David Barboza are the most prominent reporters to investigate Apple in China; here's a story about some recent changes at the Foxconn plant, for example, and one about the human costs of an iPad. One of our own colleagues, G.F., was among those who, having heard the stage show before the radio excerpt aired, was sceptical of the story because it was "implausible" to spend a couple of days in Shenzhen and come back with so much information. It was a Shanghai-based reporter from "Marketplace", Rob Schmitz, who thought the account was too incredible to be believed and tracked down Mr Daisey's translator. Still, Mr Daisey has been staggeringly self-righteous in describing himself as some kind of lone crusader. Adrian Chen, at Gawker, has a damning post about how he contacted Mr Daisey because the monologue didn't quite ring true to him; Mr Daisey, Mr Chen explains, railed against the press "for not being able to turn up the kinds of stories about Foxconn that he'd made up." With regard to child labour, for example, independent watchdogs haven't found that the Foxconn plant employs workers under the age of 16. Meanwhile, Jason Zinoman, a theatre critic who has followed Mr Daisey's work for years and admires it, writes that Mr Daisey has been challenged on his characterisation of journalists before:

A Seattle reviewer reported that Daisey said in the show that “there's no journalism” in Shenzhen, where about half of the world's consumer electronics are produced, and that the New York Times merely reprinted corporate press releases when reporting on Apple's labor practices.

This surprised me. Searching the Times archives, I found plenty of reporting, particularly from 2010, around the time of a series of employee suicides in Shenzhen. As I saw it, Daisey was diminishing the contributions of foreign correspondents working under tremendously difficult conditions in order to make his show seem more noteworthy. I criticized Daisey's comments on my Facebook page. Daisey responded on my page by attacking the writer of the review. I countered that if the review was accurate, and Daisey were a journalist, he would need to begin his next show announcing a correction. Our conversation then migrated to email, where Daisey said that he described the Times coverage as emphasizing "the economic story, and not the human one." He asked that the rest of our exchange be off the record, but it was a respectful back-and-forth, and I was happy to see that he took the journalism thread out of the show before it came to New York. But in our conversation, he never allowed that he'd gotten the facts wrong about the Times' coverage.

If Mr Daisey's monologue was presented as fiction, or inspired by true events, he could bundle these disparate events together for narrative cohesion and dramatic unity, and we would experience the monologue as he now claims it was intended, as a story about the human costs of our shiny gadgets.

But let's be clear: Mr Daisey is also making an argument about the failings of the observers, and his lies about how he came to document all these things aren't a dramatic device—they're the linchpin for that argument. That is, one of the failures he wants to condemn is the failure of the media. But in order to make the case that the media is actually failing, he needed to support the counterfactual that they could be doing so much better. And he couldn't actually prove that, so he just lied about it. Then, when challenged on his lies, Mr Daisey, like most of the narcissists who turn up in public these days, turned around and started blaming things on our dysfunctional media. This is the type of attack that gets a lot of traction these days in part because of liars like Mr Daisey, who turn up in the press claiming to have seen or done something they didn't actually see or do, and who have thereby helped damage the credibility of mainstream media organisatons. It's parochial of me, perhaps, but that's annoying.

And in addition to being annoying, Mr Daisey's lies are actually going to hurt people. See James Fallows and Max Fisher at the Atlantic, both of whom discuss how this episode will make it harder for the many journalists and watchdog organisations who do care about integrity to advance their work.

I wanted to reply right away. I don't have the time I need at this moment. Please overlook typos and bad sentences:

* You mustn't immediately jump to conclusion that any criticism of a general American media illiteracy as if by defintion comes from what you called "intellectualism". This branding doesn't help getting to the issue of what is accurate- to-facts reporting and what is not; what represents journalistic integrity and what does not.

* The man behind the plow was as sound a judge as the man in the pulpit. This what you said is truism that will endure whatever political system and whatever period in human evolution. And it is not just a piece of wisdom divined by Americans. Every wise man in every culture knows this wisdom if he/she is not a fake. That is to say, needless to say, I agree with you.

* I was talking about integrity , and that is all I care. One can be a leftie and a liar. Similarly, a rightee and a liar. Which direction the person's personal compass points has got nothing to do with it.

* I follow Car Talk as one of my two most favorite program on Public Radio (the other TAL). I follow it precisely because it is genuine American fun, no pretension (unless speaking MIT Boston is a pretension). I do not really go for thier classical music programs because ther are other programs around that are better.

* It is a mistake to brand anything in any meaningful discussion. Labels don't settle issues. Youth and maturity are not mutually exclusive. Maturity and old age are not mutually inclusive.

* I agree with you completely tax dollars for just "loads of fun" is irresponsible spending of tax money. 100% agree. But we may have some disgreemetn on "fun" that is beneficial and fun that is destructive.

* The most beautiful value the American Constitution has given itself is the First Amendment. That value needs be protected. Perhaps at all cost. Lying by jounalists is not one of the costs.

Mr Daisey has set back reforms at Foxconn (and others) by the same degree as a ceertain staff sergeant has set back Afghan nation building.
"The Jungle" was presented as a work of fiction, as were "1984" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The readers understood that what they were reading were condensed or overly dramatic, perhaps even slightly doctored renditions of conditions and situations that actually occurred, yet all of these works made an impact. There were not even bookends on Mr Daisey's report to mark it as fiction, unlike Orson Welle's rendition of "The War of the Worlds". If Mr Daisey is indeed a would-be champion of worker's rights in China and other Asian Tigers, he has just set his cause back by years. For the next few years, every time an event is reported from a Foxconn, be it a suicide, maiming, industrial accident, apologists will recall Mr Daisey and claim the report a farce.
[Recalling the cleaned up datasets from "climategate"]
Great work, Mr Daisey, next time respect your audience!

It's quite a stretch to claim that this episode discredits public radio. Public radio is not a monolith--it was, in fact, a reporter for another public radio program that uncovered the deception. And once TAL realised that they had been lied to, they spent an entire hour examining what they had gotten wrong. I can't recall any other media source engaging in such in-depth self-criticism.

"Why didn't TAL vet this broadcast beforehand? If evidence existed that it was false then that evidence existed prior to putting the "reportage" over the air. Some would argue that this sort of expose of corporations, false as it was, got a "pass" simply because it accorded with a preexisting bias."

Wait just a moment, here. Did you actually go and listen to the TAL in question? In the story, they talked about how they DID vet it, and believed that it was true based on their vetting. Then, when new facts turned up, TAL turned around and dedicated an entire show to deconstructing Daisey's story. It should also be pointed out that TAL didn't do this because they were losing corporate sponsors. They did it because they were wrong the first time.

How often do we find stories in the newspaper or on television or on radio from talking heads about Person X, Country Y, or Issue Z where they get their facts completely wrong and then never retract them? How often do these guys just take a few days off and just wait for things to blow over? Or if there's a retraction, it's given as an aside, a hiccup at the end of their show, or in small print on the back pages? TAL put an entire episode towards challenging the story, and in a very public, self-critical manner. This is what good journalism is SUPPOSED TO DO.

It's completely predictable that the GOPs water carriers would want to turn this into another evil media issue because they do that with everything, but this is actually an example of what we should want from our news outlets.

RR and DP, I don't typically make fun of an aspect of a person's physical appearance he/she can't change. Obesity is a complicated medical condition, and deserves sympathy rather tham antipathy. But in this case, because Mr. Daisey's motivation, in the final analysis, is about profiting himself (selling tickets for his show) at the expense of others (Apple, Foxconn, TAL, PBS, China, US relations with China...)- YES! – I will make an exception. A huma"n being with no integrity, whether he is "Left-leaning" or Right-leaning" - that is a pseudo political issue when the topic is INTEGRITY . Mr Daisey is fat on the outside and fat on the inside. How do you airbrush a person like that?? Because he has no personal integrity and probably doesn't know what integrity is, I say: Stay fat, Mr. Daisey! Goes well with your inside!

I have seen evidence of NPR's liberal bias myself. I went to Juan Williams' home to find out how biased he was and there were men all around the house. Cashing welfare checks. He was cashing welfare checks in his own house, charging fees that I calculated at 3, 4, 80% of the face value. Why has Fox, which actually employs Mr. Williams, not noticed this? And if they noticed, why have they said nothing? You tell me, friend. You tell me.

Yeah, climate gate was the first thing I thought of when this all came out. That killed me a little bit worse because in the end I think it is good that Foxconn makes iPads and bad that there is no price on carbon emissions. But if I were a Chinese labor reforming type, this would really piss me off.

E.G., you are being far too kind (our perhaps British) when you say Daisey's actions are "annoying".

The enormity of such bare faced lies strike at the very root of democracy, of any system of checks and balances, of justice. Can one imagine Daisey making up stories that Nazis were practising cannibalism? And then subsequently no one would believe reports of the Holocaust?

And even more surprising is that anyone would publish his fiction as anything other than just that. Fiction.

This is idiocy. Foxconn was listed, today, by the BBC, as one of the 10 largest employers in the WORLD.

There is not ONE factory employing 1.5+ million people.

Let's get a grip, here.

Walmart and MickeyD's aren't so nice to people either. I daresay some of them have suicided too.

And the two largest (China and US DoD) are in the business of death, eh. At least for the US, we have a recent history of inflicting it without meaning to (Afghanistan, Fort Hood...).

So this guy got his 5 minutes and y'all are acting like it effected you as reporters: did you watch Fox news? Did you watch the Springer show (I particularly liked the episode about the guy who chopped off his own limbs -- Jelly should'a got a Pulitzer for that one!)?

The revolutionary wars (US, Fr, USSR) it ain't: the fourth estate is a perfume ad from a 17 year old, and you should perhaps do something about it besides complaining. It doesn't take lyin' Daisy to show the truth, eh?

"Then, when challenged on his lies, Mr Daisey, like most of the narcissists who turn up in public these days, turned around and started blaming things on our dysfunctional media."

This does happen a lot, doesn't it? People lash out at scapegoats when they're cornered. Schoolboys do it all the time. "Wesley, you farted, didn't you!" "NO, no, it wasn't me, it was Artie, he's the one farting all the time!" Pretty puerile.

Some noted an "uncomfortable" sensation listening to the This American Life's "retraction" episode. It's the tone of Daisey's stubborn, exasperating refusal to own up to his lies despite all the evidences laid out right in front of him.

It's the same tone that comes across from MS' blog post, the same stubborn exasperating refusal to unequivocally condemn Daisey's lies despite having admitted that they were lies.

The root motivation I see for protesting voluntary child labor is that it undercuts the wages of adult workers including those in competing countries. Nobody in the developed world seems to care that children are pressed into labor (often uncompensated) in small family businesses and subsistence farms--even within the developed world itself. The welfare of the children (e.g. dangerous conditions, low pay, diversion from educational opportunities) strikes me as a red herring.